Writing in the 1920s, Chadwick – Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, at much the same time J. R. R. Tolkien held that post at Oxford – was initially concerned with why great traditions of epic poetry (Nordic sagas, the works of Homer, the Ramayana) always seemed to emerge among people in contact with and often employed by the urban civilizations of their day, but who ultimately rejected the values of those same civilizations.
